An image processing system in which a scanner device having a function of scanning an image, and a printer device having a function of printing image data are connected to a host computer such as a personal computer or the like via a communication medium is known. Especially, an image processing system that can print an image read by the scanner device using the printer device is called a copy system.
In the copy system, setups, control, and the like which pertain to image scan and print processes are done on the host computer. In recent years, a copy system that implements such setups, control, and the like by software called a copy application has been proposed. The copy application can display a user interface that displays a screen of copy information on a display of the host computer, and allows the operator to make copy operation on it. As for operations on the displayed user interface, a copy process can be done by simple operations, i.e., by setting the number of sets of copies and pressing a copy button.
However, to make operations easy, the conventional copy application makes setups of scan and print processes using predetermined setup values, and executes the scan and print processes based on these setup values. For this reason, images are copied with a given copy speed and copy image quality independently of the type of document.
Normally, in order to improve the quality of a copy image to be printed, an image must be scanned as high-resolution, high-quality, multi-valued data, and must be printed with high resolution and high quality. For this reason, the data size to be processed increases, and the copy speed drops considerably. In order to improve the print speed, since an image must be scanned as low-resolution, low-quality, binary data, and must be printed with low resolution and low quality, the quality of the copy image to be printed deteriorates considerably.
Therefore, in the conventional copy system, upon determining the predetermined setup values, the quality of the copy image to be printed and the copy speed are balanced to set intermediate values. That is, setup values of the scan process are set to obtain middle-resolution, standard-quality, multi-valued data, and setup values of the print process are set to obtain a middle-resolution, standard-quality image.
For this reason, for example, when a text document is simply copied, a copy time longer than that required for copying a single document image is required. When a color photo is copied, the quality of the printed image is considerably lower than the original color photo.
To prevent such increase of copy time or deterioration of picture quality, setups of the scan and print processes corresponding to a document to be copied can be done. However, in the conventional copy application, setups of the scan process are made on a user interface displayed by a scanner driver for driving the scanner device, and setups of the print process are made on a user interface displayed by a printer driver for driving the printer device.
That is, a problem arises in that the user must make complicated operations to merely copy, resulting in very poor operability. Furthermore, the user may set wrong values of the scan or print process, i.e., cannot often set setup values he or she really wanted to set. In this case, a problem arises in that the copy speed may become excessively low, or the printed copy image may have inadvertently poor quality.